Three poems by John T. Trigonis

Footprints

You can never be truly naked with
all that ink etched into your
epidermis, living off and loving every
once-clean inch of you.
Footprints clawed into ivory sand-skin,
silverfish constellations screeching
against chalkboard skies.
Messages bottled in between every
already dead shimmer and sigh,
whiskey aged and St. John bathed in
an afterbirth of broken doors leading to
transcendence.
If only my words could learn to live off
the indigo wilderness of your flesh, yes,
these same wanderers I whittle and scratch
onto sandless shores in your absence,
then might you once again be
truly naked with me at your side,
even amid all your needless ink ––
and mine –– that we try so desperately
to make sparkle and shine.

Silver

“I like the silver in your hair,” she said.
And then she showed me just how much.

Night slips itself into the next morning.
A leprechaun makes a lousy alibi.

We tell ourselves fictions because the nons
are too real for morning television.

Netflix in the backseat of an’89 Mustang,
top down in the dead silent primordial––

“Shhh!” she says and takes my hand. And
that’s how you know the birds sing

just for you.

Burnt Lentil Soup

My apartment still smells like burnt lentil soup since
the night you vinegared good-bye into my

sleep-salted ear. I peppered the mine fields
of my kitchen, seasoned to taste,

but those torched pulses tangled my nose hairs
into knots. Your gorgon’s gaze statued me Gordian

in my slippers, ancient blackened legumes
branded at the bottom of an old pot my dad carried

over from communist Greece. The following
night lost its appetite the moment I lost my

supper companion, walls still sticky with our morning
after love affairs and all my oils your

boiling water couldn’t boil away completely.